


Cocoon

by boychik



Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: Alcoholism, Gen, Hallucinations, Hitsuzen, futility
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:54:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boychik/pseuds/boychik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Yuuko's life is unfortunate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cocoon

Behind painted-red lips and a veil of expertly blown smoke Yuuko sits, trapped in her cocoon. She gazes over her shop, taking in an austerity that belies its magical nature: the neat tatami mats, the floor swept spotless by that irritable naïf, the perfect wooden grids in the walls.

Maru and Moro, those sweet but hapless children, play vacant-eyed before her. Not children, but vessels, that’s all they are.

Watanuki is loud, but for all he complains it takes a shockingly short amount of time to summon him. Not even a snap of the fingers and he materializes at her side. Yuuko balances her kiseru on a languid hand and blows smoke into a perfect ring. It looks like a halo, or a noose.

Her life feels like a red string that’s tangled beyond hope. Long ago it may have sung out to magic or power, immortality and Clow, but now it stretches miles and miles without end. Crisscrossing the dimensions for so many years (in search of what?) has left her wrapped and choked in her own mess, like a fully grown butterfly trapped in its cocoon. She’s pressed up against the hard thick walls—they are beautiful, a crystalline ink, but they cannot, will not yield. She sees a hundred lips and limbs bend at strange angles against of the swath of knotty thread. They are her own.

Pressing shut her eyes does not make the swarm of visions disappear. The crooked forms glow and pulse. Suddenly this whole shop feels suffocating, engulfed in a smoke she cannot command. She knows that this life she’s created for herself will never come undone.

Even when she fades from this world in a final shattering, the thread will still be wrapped around the neck of the boy. At first he’ll try to simply pick through it, holding it away from his delicate white skin. Slowly, he’ll realize that there is nothing that can be done. _Hitsuzen_ has come to bite him in the ass.

It’s a sobering thought, so she calls in Watanuki again to serve her another round.


End file.
